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Published: August 31st 2015
Church in Bar
When it is finished it will be surrounded by water. The gold domes were the first thing we saw as the train pulled up at the station."Why did you come to Montenegro?" This is the question the locals ask us when we tell them we have come from Australia. They must underrate the natural beauty of their country (the coast line at least) as we think it is worth a visit.
Bar was our first destination (its the name of the town not the type we often visit to drink!) and one that I had not expected to linger in for very long, but we decided that we liked the laid back feel of this rather modern town with a lot of sporting facilities near our apartment. The beach is long and there is a pedestrian path alongside it, which we used for our morning runs. We also passed the large basketball stadium, many football (soccer) pitches, a good athletics track, tennis courts (both hard court and clay), beach volleyball, discuss and hammer throw cage. We were here for a weekend and during our stay I noticed everything being used. One day we caught part of a local football match on the main pitch. There were a few dozen riot police in armour and a couple of police vans with strong wire over their windows for
Petrovec
The lookout at the entrance to the port. protection. Like in England, each team’s supporters are kept separate by high fences and police, but unlike England, the crowd was only about 100 people and we didn’t have to pay to watch.
They are building a large new church in the modern section of town and it has extremely shiny blue and gold domes on its roof. It is not being used yet, but I saw the bell ringer practicing on the manual bells at the top of one of the towers once. He holds ropes in his hands and makes a musical tune high above the town. The photo of this church shows how different it is to most that we have seen so far.
We had planned to spend a few days in the next major town along the coast, Budva, but instead we did a day trip on a boat to see it and a few other places along the way. Petrovec is very pretty. It has an old world charm and from a café perched above the beach it was pleasant to watch the world go by. Our next visit on the tour was Sveti Stefan, a place I had been looking forward
Sveti Stefan
Google it and you will find much better pictures than this. They all hide Budva, which is very close to the left of this pic. to for a long time. It is a tiny rock connected to the main land by a thin strip of sand and with centuries old buildings looks picturesque in all of the photos I had seen before I came. But from the water it didn’t live up to my expectation. Only the rich and famous get to stay in Sveti Stefan. So we never walked around its streets to get a feel for it. It is next to Budva and is being engulfed by a tourism behemoth. Budva is the high density sunbathing capital of Montenegro and perhaps Europe. Its two long beaches are crammed with sunbeds. Not a square centimetre has gone to waste and I don’t see the appeal. In our three hours there, we wandered the old town, which stacks up well against the many we have visited so far.
There are lots of water polo facilities in Montenegro including swimming pools and goals that are anchored in the water off various beaches. I never saw one of these nets being used though.
On to Kator and what a contrast it was to Bar. Kator is a medieval fort at the end of a fjord.
That’s right, like the ones in Norway. It is beautiful for its natural scenery as much as its medieval bastions and buildings, about which we wandered and climbed. I don’t know how they managed to make such walls, high up in the precipitous heights above the town and port, but they did. The bay of Kator is stunning for its steep walled valley. I don’t think the photos do it justice.
In Kator we stayed with a lovely host above her house in one of two apartments she has created for tourists. There was a significant language barrier, but she adored Nathan and he soon learnt what ‘choco banano’ means. My favourite word in Montenegro; Hair dresser = Frizerski. Leanne’s favourite; Most common beer here = Niksicko. Why do we call Montenegro, Montenegro when it is called Crna Gora over here. Likewise, Croatia is called Hrvatska.
Our 2 hour ride to Dubrovnik became a 4 hour ride thanks to a long wait at costoms. How tedious!!!! When we finally got there we met random hotel man at the bus station and agreed to stay with him for one night because that is all he could do for us.
Soon after we discovered that he was short tempered, rude, irritable, random hotel man and we were glad that we didn’t have to stay any longer. But Dubrovnik is still amazing to look at. The old town is the biggest and most impressive so far. A lot of it has been rebuilt after the Yugoslavian war in the 90’s. The difference we noticed from ten years ago, when we visited once before, it the number of tourists. We really felt like part of the heard here.
Having slept on a train, then Nathan was looking forward to sleeping on a boat. We caught an overnight ferry to Bari in Italy to eat our way around that country. Gelati vendos, ‘Stock Up!”.
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